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Abstract
Coverage of the 2005 riots in France underlined the multimedia and transnational nature of contemporary news. The controversies that spun out of the coverage even as it was being produced extended larger debate about emerging journalism practices and products. This case study, centered on the meta-discourse of the riots and the relationships among the diverse media covering the riots, underlines the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's influential field theory to studies of new media and suggests a critical update to Bourdieu's conception of the field. Bourdieu placed the norms and values of the participants of a field at the center of his analysis, but his theory, as it has been applied to journalism, rests on a stark division between journalists and their audiences. The news story of the French riots was very much a new-media product in that it was created by professionals and non-professionals. In Bourdieu's vocabulary, the amateurs at the middle of the riots and in nations around the world contributing news product constituted new “agents” whose influence on the field has yet to be fully considered. The rise of the audience-participant poses compelling new challenges to field study. This article points out some of the areas scholars across disciplines and methodological approaches might take up for research.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank John Tomasic, Linda Steiner, and the anonymous CSMC reviewers.
Notes
1. In October and November of 2005 the largest riots in France since May 1968 erupted after the accidental death of two teenagers during a police chase in Clichy-sous-Bois, a working-class suburb of Paris. Groups of mostly second-generation French youth burned cars and public buildings throughout France. The riots also spurred unrest in several other European countries, including Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, and Greece. Analysts viewed the unrest as a response to long smoldering perceptions of racist inequality and exclusion. For in-depth information and analysis see the Social Science Research Council's collection of web essays on the riots at http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/
2. Machinima refers to machine cinema or machine animation—computer game imagery is used to create low cost, easily distributable films.
3. All translations of blog posts, comments, and articles quoted here that originally appeared in French were translated into English by the author.
4. For a list of blogs included, see the Appendix. All blogs were accessible as of April 2007.
5. Kuhn (1994) provides one of the most convincing attempts to address the issue of the difference in style between the French and U.S. models of journalism. He argues that the “journalism of ideas” in France often exhibits an overt political point of view whereas the “journalism of information” in the U.S. is characterized by at least the appearance of separation between facts and values (see also Glasser & Ettema, 1998; Hallin & Giles, 2004).
6. Wikipedia, the online reference site, is one of the most popular sites in cyberspace, hosting per month roughly 154 million users worldwide, who cite, co-author, edit, contest, and plagiarize its entries. The number of Wikipedia entries is in the millions and constantly expanding. There are no official author qualifications required. It has no traditional editors or publishers. The site's traffic statistics are available at Wikipedia.com with analysis provided by the Alexa Web Information Service (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=12782661).
7. Informal interview with French “trip-hop” and “trance” DJ Ananda. Paris, April 2006.
8. See, for example, posts about the film by The New York Times reporter Clive Thompson on his weblog Collision Detection (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/11/_heres_an_extre.html), at Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/28/political_film_comme.html), World Changing (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003876.html), and Indymedia (radio.indymedia.org/news/2005/11/7815.php).
9. Gitlin (1980) asserts that frames “enable journalists to process large amounts of information quickly and routinely [and to] package the information for the efficient relay to their audiences” (p. 7).